We still work hard and will continue to do so because we are conditioned for the first 21 years of our lives to work hard at school.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is going to get disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition and balance out fifty chemical equations.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks. That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly. I would like to save those debates for another day.
I'm no economist but it seems like competition for housing drives up prices as wages increase. Also, more generally, people's happiness seems to be more correlated with their economic rank in a society, rather than their wealth in absolute terms [1]. So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $50 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
> So, people want to do better than their neighbors, not just do well.
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
Productivity gains have mostly gone to the investor class, they’re not only not working but making more for not working than they ever have. Elon could go sniff glue for a day and he’ll make more money than most of us would working 10 jobs for the rest of our lives.
This reminded me of a strange quote I heard a while ago:
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard. The hardest working participants of the labor market will set the tone of the competition for high-paying jobs.
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
The mismanagement of inelastic labor supply into soggy labor demand in order to minimize wages is completely intentional.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
The industrialists tried to coup FDR. They filled the air waves and newspapers with paid opinions about how his pro-labor policy would sink the economy. And then it didn't. Not only did it not sink the economy, it led to arguably the greatest period of middle class prosperity ever seen.
I think there was another small event that occurred around the same time that confounds things a bit. An event which VERY heavily involved industrialists.
Your calculator must be broken? As your own link tells, the Haymarket Affair ushered in the 8 hour workday, not 40 hours per week. 8 * 6 (sometimes 7) = 48 (sometimes 56).
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
Typical? I know a bunch of tech folks, and none of them are pushing huge hours.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
The simple answer is wrong obviously, because it fails to address the nuance.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
> The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society are willing to work this hard
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%. So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a Twitter troll.
Nobody wants to admit they are having a 15 hour work week with AI, but if in office attendence is any indication, I think many knowledge workers are starting to reduce work hours. It is much easier to do so remotely.
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
To me the opposite effect seems to occur: management sees one guy get a ton of a certain kind of work done with AI and then expects everyone to increase all work output by that much because they also have access to AI.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
IMO: if my company slows down to a healthier 30 hours, we lose to competitors and lose our livelihoods. So we have to keep up the 40 hours or disappear. Seems like so much effort is wasted in competition.
Seems like tragedy of the commons principle - if everyone was chilling and working 20 hour weeks, I'd do the same. But people hustle and grind to get rich so that's the culture I have to adapt to.
We work this hard because there's insufficient collective drive to provide for all before the wealthy are allowed to extract.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The problem is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary pool of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if you produce only the 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Labor can never be reduced under capitalism if you never prioritize meeting needs first.
We live in a money-based economy. Money comes from other people, who don't give it away unless you satisfy them somehow. Those people that want work from you, will take all the work you can perform (up to the limit of labor laws). That's why.
Every economy is "money-based" in some way, money is just an abstract representation of value. You can try to get rid of it, but it will come back in another form because "value" is still useful to quantify and resources are finite.
It's something of a collective action problem even beyond power relations. My motivation to work less than 40h just isn't that high since everyone around me is working 40h too.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
Whitney’s cotton gin increased the speed separating cotton fibers from the sticky seeds by 50x. I wonder if labor will experience similar outcomes with the efficiency AI creates?
Yeah, it only takes half the time to make the same stuff, but we aren't making the same stuff now, are we? (Or do you all want to go back to the pre-AI, pre-Internet, effectively pre-computer 70s?)
One aspect that interests me is the relative difficulty of "part time" employment. We define "full time" as 40 hours a week (number may vary depending on location and field, but that's the stereotypical value). The wage that brings in may be, for successful people in a reasonably lucrative field, substantially more than needed for a comfortable life.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
The "we" in this is a missing a piece: the size of the labor force. It's shrinking. Has been for 20+ years, with a peak around 2000.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
Answer: People are reluctant to live in 2026 the way they did in 1973.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
because we don't have organized labor, all current working conditions in the US have been provided by through organized labor — child labor laws, weekends, 8 hour workdays, breaks, you name it... employers have never given any of this freely along with productivity gains
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status
Because the people in charge of deciding which work should be done have decided that we should spend every waking hour making them more powerful. Next!
In theory we could just come together, start focusing on building a working society which defines what we need and what we want and just build it efficently.
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
Short of a windfall or fanciful ideas of starting my own business (and then having to work even harder), I'm still a wage slave who needs to keep doing what the man asks of me so he will give me my monthly stipend
That may be true for the individual, but the man can be kicked to the curb at any time with ease if the workers collectively decide to. The man is only a belief.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
The man just sets policy that maximizes prices and minimizes wages, so that the median person still works full time and lives hand-to-mouth even while the economy has achieved a level of productivity that would have been compatible with Keynes' 15 hour workweeks were the surplus not devoted exclusively to pumping assets.
If working people in industrialized society weren't artificially kept indebted and poor (relative to the wealth they should have), then it would be impossible for the rulers to control the population, and they would loose their power.
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
I was reading this and a question came up. It ultimately works under the premise that there is only one ticket — so the conclusion is that the ticket must be ownership.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.
21 years is a third of your productive life, a time when you body still works, can repair itself rapidly, you have very little responsibilities and thus can take more risk and explore the frontiers of possibility.
The math teacher tells you to write out twenty tables of addition, so you do it.
The chemistry teacher tells you to balance out fifty chemical equations, so you do it.
If you question why, you fail.
If you question is there's a better way to demonstrate the understanding, you fail.
If you refuse to do these assignments and start a lemonade stand, you fail.
Thankfully working hard is going to get disrupted. An LLM doesn't sleep, take breaks, fall asleep after three 6 hour shifts or take sick leave. Nothing works as hard as an LLM and even basic LLMs that can run on commodity GPUs with 6GB of VRAM can write out twenty tables of addition and balance out fifty chemical equations.
People will argue that balancing out fifty chemical equations and writing out twenty tables of addition is necessary to gain the foundation necessary to do more abstract tasks. That to be an effective Front End developer you need to code in x86 assembly. I would like to save those debates for another day.
1. Boyce, Brown & Moore (2010), “Money and Happiness: Rank of Income, Not Income, Affects Life Satisfaction”
The "golden billion" people almost all live in luxury, by the standards of an early industrial society like the early 19th century Europe which Marx described, and daily use a ton of amenities which even the mightiest king could not afford 1000 years ago. But we take it for granted.
I could have taken my savings and downshifted to a comfortable life in a third-world country. But instead I've put them in my wife's business, and keep working, while living in one of the most expensive cities in the Solar system. This is because I want a better education for my children, and success for the business. (The city is also enjoyable when I have the time.)
Then, some amenities are still expensive. Think about medical care, especially larger-scale like cardiac surgery. Well, think about the cost of a Claude subscription if you live otherwise happily for $50 / day in an inexpensive third-world countryside.
We work so much because there's still utility in it, in many cases. We have plenty, but not plenty enough.
This is a significant claim. What do you base this on? Are there any studies or references?
That's not what your data shows. It just shows that people don't want to be near the bottom of the pile, because it indicates they're being mistreated (which they are).
People don't want to "do better then their neighbors," they just don't want to be left behind by society.
Framing it the way you do makes it seem like everyone desires brutal social darwinism. It's not true. People just want to be treated fairly and live in a relatively egalitarian world.
I'm not dismissing what you are saying, but do you have evidence for what "people want"? In my experience, when somebody claims to know what people want then it tends to be a mix of "I want", "the people I know want", "I hope people want", "people should want", and a few others, rarely with any evidence.
This creates crank where even billionaires will whip their workers to death over competition with their neighbors.
"I think the problem we've had is, people decided they didn't want to work so much anymore. (...)
We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around. (...)
So it's a dynamic that has to change. We've got to kill that attitude, and it's go to come through hurting the economy, and that's what the whole world, the governments around the world are trying to increase unemployment, to get that to some sort of normality."
-Tim Gurney
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJHP0VfeOrU&t=12s
A typical tech job requires far more than 40 hour work weeks.
We need to react to it with the same intentionality that we did a century ago when we won the 40 hour work week, which still hasn't been entirely eroded despite half a century of chipping away.
What do you mean won? The 40 hour work week was instituted during the Great Depression (hence why you see 1938 in the link) to try and get more people back into the labour force. The idea was that, like, if those working 60 hour weeks were forced into working 40 hours then 20 hours would open up for someone else, giving them some spending money to open up the economy again.
The 40 hour work week was originally conceived of by labor, which may be what you're thinking of, but it wasn't put in place for them. That was for businesses so that they could have more customers.
You need to read up on your history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair
The 40 hour work week came in 1938. This is even echoed in the original link, as mentioned earlier.
Work for a ramen noodle startup? Sure. Work for a typical profitable company (Atlassian/Xero, whatever) - and I just don't see it.
Especially with the leverage of good LLMs operated well - if anything I find I have less time pressures than more, and I over deliver as compared to almost every one of my peers.
The most powerful members of our society (not the hardest working ones) are the ones who set the tone for the rest of us. We only need to continue working this hard as long as we accept their dominion over our society.
That's a choice we make as a society every day, and it's probably a result of the simplistic form of thinking you offer in your comment.
Dig deeper.
Let me fix that for you.
The simple answer is that we will continue to work this hard as long as some members of society hoard wealth beyond the wildest imagination of those in the bottom 99%. So much wealth they quite literally don't know what to do with it, and for a cherry on top they're not even happy. The richest man on the planet is a Twitter troll.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
Someone from the shadow wizard money gang will have to chime in and explain how this is all actually a good thing ;)
Some are filling hours with more work however it seems like many are not increasing work volume, just quietly reducing the amount of labor.
Of course "some folks say they work a lot more than they actually do" is also nothing new to AI anyways.
I have.
Almost 13 years of data on this. The only time my productivity tanks is when I grind 40-50 hours a week for months on end.
If 2 people both need something to survive, then collectively the group needs to produce 2 of those things. But if 1 of them demands 1000 of that thing, then collectively they need to produce 1001 of that thing to satisfy the demand.
The problem is that the demand for the extra 999 is given equal weight and competes for production resources vs the 2 that are actually needed instead of explicitly prioritizing the 2 and then letting the 999 come from a secondary pool of post-needs-fulfillment labor. Right now if you produce only the 2, then most of the time the person who only wants the 1 that they need won't get anything at all, and in many cases that means they starve and die.
When the consequence of collectively producing less than the total sum demanded by the wealthy is that some people will then starve and die, that hangs like an inverse sword of damocles over the heads of the poor and middle class, always threatening those who can't just buy their way out into laboring more than would be otherwise needed.
The very obvious to me solution is to structurally prioritize meeting everyone's common needs for food/water, shelter, and medical care first before then satisfying the desires of the rich who want more. That way rich people can still get all their private jets and fancy cars, but they'll need to pay more to convince people that the loss of their leisure time is worthwhile instead of everyone in the underclass living under constant threat for survival.
Labor can never be reduced under capitalism if you never prioritize meeting needs first.
I work and do something very specific, a lot of people around me do not need what I do.
I need water, food, energy, I don't know anyone personally who is providing this for me.
Then we have A LOT of people in our society (no critisism here) who get food, housing energy etc. without satisfying anyone.
What i want to say: 1. in a highly automated society there is a real disconnect between you getting something and you doing something for it.
Also has to do with demand for savings. The US has a bunch of mostly accidental policies that juice that demand.
We aren't competing with workers from 1973, we're competing with other workers leveraging the same accelerated efficiency.
But let's say I decide that I'd be happy with my life at 50% of my current pay, and I want to do 50% less work in exchange. 20 hours per week instead of 40. If you're in the kind of job that makes enough for this to work, you probably can't do it. 20 hours per week is for crappy jobs in retail and food service. It's very unlikely that you'll find a tech job willing to employ you part time at any pay level.
So even if I, personally, am sufficiently productive and sufficiently compensated that I could afford to work a lot less than people did 50 years ago, I can't do it. At least, I can't do it on a rolling basis. The closest I can come is to retire early. Or maybe take some years off in the middle of my career, but that's extremely risky. I definitely can't cut my hours and pay in half over a week, or month, or even year.
Some people are working hard. The growing demographic is the retired, the trust-funded and those NEET-ing around on various forms of subsistence income. Another few years we'll be back to post-war levels ~%58 of participation, where two-parent homes prevailed, and one stayed home.
The additional compensation is a statistical artifact that accounts for air conditioning, iPhones, reliable cars that last 20 years, the Internet, etc.
the current productivity gains have mostly been captured by the richest, and everyone else is competing against each other for the scraps... if you choose to work less, you are out-competed and lose your status
The fact that we can do in 16 hours what we used to in 40 doesn't suddenly mean that people are only willing to work 16 hours.
We could just get rid of any inefficency.
Capitalism is driving our current economy, it doesn't has to.
There is no real reason why we couldn't decide tomorrow that every car is electric and depending on some factor you can just request a car.
Planet earth has resources x, the only question is for what we use it and how we distribute it.
But no if i want to be self sufficient (100%) i can't do this.
If i want to exit capitalism and build up a country not defined by it, i can't either.
If i kill bad leaders, i will be thrown in prison.
We're still working this hard because we, as a group, want to. It is as simple as that.
Next!
A ruler will always prefer to rule over 100 wretches, than be an equal with 100 peers. And people all over the world have been bred to submit by relentless head stomping by family, school and media.
But the current order will end without violence and be forgotten as foolishness, just like the spell of the feared Soviet terror regime ended as if people woke up from a dream. Just like the strangle grip of popes, priests and monks ended and is now the source of ridicule. Our children's children will look with nothing but disgust at how the current population worship "governments", "authorities" and so on - all of these illusions made up of some of the least admirable people alive.
But if machines produce more, couldn't the state provide free services rather than cash? In kind provision could be less dependent on wages than taxation is.
Then couldn't we divide the monetary system further — not as banknotes, but by subdividing it? Would the administrative system be too difficult after all?
In other words, if the problem is that only the "wage" earned for participating in production grants the right to consume, then shouldn't tickets to the means of production also be distributed?
Still, no matter how I think about it, in the end it comes down to the problem of distribution. The OP also gives capital ownership as an example, but...
If automation can enable substantial production without human labor, then what on earth is the reason we should keep demanding that humans do wage labor for survival? I find myself thinking about this a lot these days.
Someone who did not participate in production can consume the product because they own capital. Then what is the basis on which that right arises?
In fact, economic logic, when you think about it, seems to be mostly a kind of circular reasoning. It says "capital's share equals its marginal contribution," but that market itself is ultimately something created by power.
Sometimes I have thoughts like this. In fact, the core of capitalism is the ownership of the means of production, and such ownership will keep accumulating ever-widening disparities. If automation keeps advancing, humans will eventually become unnecessary — and then how will the market be maintained? We cannot give everyone a claim on automated production. In the end, a ruling class and a ruled class will inevitably exist, and the question becomes how the ruling class can rule entirely with the consent of the ruled. Lately, it seems this principle no longer works in capitalism.